Full disclosure: if Jerry Saltz cared enough to pay attention to my practice, he would describe me as a "zombie formalist." Fair enough. The "good old days of abstraction" serve as a point of reference for my work; I employ "haggard shades of pale"; and I eschew "complex structural presences" (all quotes from Saltz's now notorious "Why Does So Much New Abstraction Look the Same?"). Yet the conservatism of his argument---and its attendant longing for presence---seems quaint, particularly at a time when so many painters (myself included) are engaged in a critical examination of what a more rigorous thinker once described as "mediated visuality" (I have in mind Peter Weibel).